Orcon co-location customers housed in Vector Communications’ Northcote Telehousing Centre were off the air early this morning, as an 11,000 Volt feeder line to the facility failed.

Philippa White, Vector’s spokeswoman, says the data centre was affected by a neighbourhood mains outage at 5:29 this Monday morning. Mains power was restored at 9:23 in the morning, and White says full service is being restored to individual cabinets in the centre in stages.

The Vector data centre houses Auckland ISP Orcon, but its general manager of regulatory and industry affairs Scott Bartlett is at pains to point out that the provider’s core network was not affected by the outage. “Only some services for customers were down,” Bartlett says, but adds that Orcon’s 150,000 retail and its wholesale customers were not hit by the outage. Only “some servers reset themselves,” as the outage hit, Bartlett says.

Bartlett says there was only momentary disruption to some services, but wasn’t able to tell Geekzone which ones were affected. He believes there are some delays to mail service however.

While he wants to be careful with giving the situation the all-clear as Vector and Orcon engineers are still working on restoring services to customers, Bartlett hopes everything will be up and running as normal by this afternoon.

Neither White nor Bartlett provided an explanation as to why there are no redundancy arrangements to prevent a single feeder line failure from disrupting services the way it did.